It’s good to see that there are a few journalists who actually take journalism seriously and question what they are being told. One publication that has been doing a good job on this is Switzerland-based Weltwoche, which has written two pieces about the latest IPCC report. See here and here.
Photo: Alex Reichmuth, Weltwoche.
Hat tip: Reader Kurt Arner
Now Weltwoche follows up with a commentary by veteran journalist Alex Reichmuth, titled: “The Perspiration of Fear” and Climate appearing in the print edition. In it he writes that the alarmist warnings of the IPCC have become a worn-out ritual, having little more than a bounce of a dead cat. Moreover, like all other environmental predictions of doom and gloom made in the past, man-made climate change will also be relegated to the dustbin of history.
IPCC has confused the public
Reichmuth writes that if anything, the climate scientists and the IPCC, in their desperate scramble to explain the unexpected changes in climate science, have been only successful in confusing the public. Last winter renowned climate institutes admitted the “climate pause” and the IPCC came under pressure to come up with an explanation for it. Climate change was no longer happening, the public was told, thus contradicting all the earlier claims of run-away warming that the IPCC had consistently preached for years and years. The science had been settled, but then it was not. So what was the IPCC to do? Reichmuth:
Ultimately the IPCC decided that the pause could be explained as being unimportant.”
As Reichmuth describes it, the move by the IPCC resembled more a last-ditch effort to salvage the global warming scare. He writes:
Indeed only with great difficulty is the IPCC able to hide that it has a serious problem. […] If the thermometer remains stuck at its current level for a few more years, then all IPCC models calculations will become irrelevant and the basis for justifying CO2 reductions would be gone. So the IPCC decides to ignore the warming pause and claims that global warming continues and that man is responsible.”
And so the media and public get their cue to resume their panic. Few, however, are listening anymore.
In the 1980s dying forests refused to die
The call to resume the climate panic reminds Reichmuth of the 1980s forest die-off scare. Soon, because of man-made acid rain, the globe would become a barren wasteland, it was claimed – unless of course mankind stopped industry immediately. But the forests defied projections and refused to die. And as is the case today with CO2, authorities refused to acknowledge that reality and relentlessly insisted that the forest was indeed dying. Reichmuth writes, “It didn’t help. Just a few years later it become clear that the forests weren’t dying.”
Reichmuth writes that the IPCC is now threatened with the very same fate of irrelevance. Even worse the public is losing interest and few are heeding their cries of “wolf” anymore. Reichmuth points out that today only 39% of Germans (who for years had been relentlessly bombarded by dire predictions of a climate catastrophe and shielded from real dissenting views) are afraid of climate change – that figure was 62% just seven years ago. The same trend holds for Switzerland. Reichmuth:
In 2007 the Swiss media databank reported 5200 articles that contained the word “climate change”. In 2009 the figure was down to 3700. This year at the end of September it was just over 1500. With the other environmental ‘hype stories’ a phase of declining interest was always followed by forgetting altogether”.
Scare goes from acid rains…to acid oceans
Ironically environmentalists are on the move again to the next scare story. They went from population explosion in the 1960s, to global cooling in the 1970s, then to acid rain of the 1980s, next to global warming in the 1990s, and today they are preparing the move to acid oceans.